Impossible Dance: Club Culture and Queer World-Making (review)

Scholars who take up Fiona Buckland's Impossible Dance: Club Culture and Queer World-Making will step into the vastly under-explored arena that Buckland defines as "improvised social dancing in queer clubs" (2). Based on four years of interviews with New York's queer club-goers, her book describes the forms of preparation, performance, and politicized exchange that transpire in these volatile sites. As she observes from the start, "improvised social dancing has been relegated to the sidelines in scholarship, not least because of its perceived impossibility—that is, its resistance to discursive description" (2). Formal, scored modes of social dance such as the tango are difficult enough to render into words. What, then, about the spontaneous, often ineffable actions and gestures that transpire in queer clubs? How does one forge a theory of value for the affective knowledge that emerges from this seemingly inchoate mode of performance? What promises, possibilities, and ways of relating to others does such movement signify to its diverse practitioners? How does dance set politics in motion?

In her first chapter, Buckland puts forth the parameters through which she will archive the "theatres of queer world-making" (16) she encountered. However, this invocation of queerness obliges her to confront singular notions of gay and lesbian "identity," as well as utopian ideals of "community." In an effort to concretize New York's evolving queer "lifeworlds" (5), Buckland redefines both space and the status of the performers who inhabit such spaces. "Lifeworlds" are environments "that contain many voices, many practices, and not a few tensions" (4). These are not "bordered cultures with recognizable laws," but "productions in the moment," spaces that remain "fluid and moving by means of the dancing body" (4). Similarly, subjects who produce such mobile environs are hardly static in how they understand and perform the points of interaction among their race, socio-economic background, and same-sex attractions: "Identity is not fixed, but tied to movement and its contexts" (5).

Buckland reconfigures space and identity as contingent on movement and contexts. Much of Buckland's work relies on queer ephemera, since a central part of her methodology is ethnography. Throughout, she grapples deftly with this often-criticized approach to gathering data, providing unorthodox revisions to how the practice routinely works. One example is her departure from asking informants a fixed set of questions in the hope of being told, "this is how we do things around here," in favor of inviting them to tell her a story about "how they moved around New York City when they first wanted to find and create queer lifeworlds. Where did they go and how did they meet others like themselves" (21)?

In response, informants perform "theatres of memory" (18). Though narrated in language, such theatres also reside in the body, as evidenced, for instance, by an Argentine ex-patriot's shaking hand as he recalls defending himself from homophobic assailants with a broken bottle in the early 1970s, when walking to Chelsea's gay clubs meant traversing a tough, Latino neighborhood. In tracing memories of past movements, some informants draw makeshift maps of Manhattan on scraps of paper, marking spaces mostly shuttered or demolished now due to the AIDS crisis, and the city's draconic rezoning of adult businesses. Buckland compares informants' theatres of memory with other gay maps of the city: those marketed at the Gay Pride Parade to a largely white, male audience distinguished by disposable income. Her subjects—people of color, low-income students, teachers, door people, and HIV-positive persons on disability—"deliberately constitute queer life worlds that overlay, complement, and contradict official maps" (28). Their cognitive maps of defunct lifeworlds like the West Side piers, and their fond appraisals of the glamorous sleaze that once infused the Squeezebox and Saint dance clubs queer the parade's linear trajectory, unsettling its focus on trendy, sanitized sites...